Lady Gaga becomes a ‘billion-hit’ artist

If you have watched any of Lady Gaga's online videos, you are part of this story.

The controversial, and for some too racy, artist's online videos have recorded one billion hits making her a record breaker.

The three videos on YouTube and Vevo that helped Lady Gaga set the record were Just Dance, Bad Romance and Poker Face with Poker Face alone recording around 375 million hits.

Watch Lady Gaga Videos

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Vote for GaGa on Billboard’s ‘Sexiest Person in Music’ Poll!

Billboard — Who’s the sexiest person in music? Very tough call, we know. You can imagine how much arguing took place at the Billboard offices as we tried to come to an agreement. The truth is, we couldn’t! So we’re leaving it up to our readers to decide.

Lady GaGa is nominated! You can vote here.

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Lady Gaga Is Poised To Conquer The World

The amateur videos would be captivating enough on their own. In one, a dignified young brunette is onstage with a piano and a jazzy ballad, performing for a university audience. In another, the girl and her blue-jeaned band gamely make their way through a Led Zeppelin cover tune.

But there’s a bonus layer of intrigue to those old YouTube clips, which have piled up tens of thousands of views. They’re a peek at a pop phenomenon in its infancy: Lady Gaga in the making. And they help document one of the most successful self-reinventions in recent pop history.

The world is now well-acquainted with the 23-year-old New Yorker born Stefani Germanotta, whose infectious dance-pop and edgy presence have brought her to the cusp of global superstardom. She was a college student and aspiring songwriter when that camcorder footage was shot. Now she heads into 2010 with momentum from five Top 10 singles and several show-stopping performances, and it’s a good bet that by 2020 we’ll view her as one of the decade’s cultural icons.

By transforming herself into a fabulous glam queen, Lady Gaga joins an elite clique of artists who have made careers out of reinvention. The obvious comparisons are the ones Gaga has cited herself: Madonna, David Bowie, Freddie Mercury, Bette Midler. They’re musicians who empowered themselves to craft new personas — sometimes over and over again — and to use public image as its own artistic statement.

For most artists, pop spectacle is a kind of showbiz façade. For Lady Gaga, it’s a form of self-expression.

And making it click is no small feat: In an era saturated with colorful characters, when outrageousness is always just a mouse click away, Gaga’s panache has managed to stand out.

Talk to fans and industry pros about the appeal, and one word pops up a lot: authentic. There’s something organic in the synthesized sounds of “Paparazzi,” something honest in the eccentric couture fashion, even something serene in the visual razzle-dazzle.

“Lady Gaga has the real goods. You could see that very early. You saw her and just said, ‘Whoa, this is something special,’ ” says Live Nation’s Rick Franks, a three-decade industry veteran who booked Gaga for a pair of Detroit shows this week. “Talent shows itself every time. You’ve either got it or don’t, and she’s got it. She’s got star power as large as anyone, and right now it’s all working.”

She’s been happy to flex that star power, raising the stakes as she goes. This week’s Detroit stand, originally scheduled for the Fox Theatre, was moved to Joe Louis Arena as Gaga continued to beef up her production — expanding from a theater set into what Franks calls a “major Broadway spectacular” that will arrive in eight semi-trailers.

Easily dismissed at a casual glance as just another prefab pop concoction, Gaga has won over fans with a smart, self-aware approach. Behind the Kermit the Frog dresses, there seems to be an implicit message: Yes, this is performance art. Yes, I’m refashioning myself on the fly. Yes, this is my adventure, and you can dive in if you want.

That attitude — and the realization that genuine musical talent is at work — has earned Gaga the trust of even skeptical listeners.

“That’s what ended up selling me on her,” says Kelly Stanaj of Grand Blanc, a mother and former art teacher whose tastes lean to classic rock. “I’m not so keen on electronic dance-pop. When I first started hearing her — hearing ‘Poker Face’ nine times a day at the gym — I was kind of annoyed.

“And then I saw her perform live on TV. I realized this isn’t just some Auto-Tuned, keyboard dance thing. This was real. She is dedicated to her music down to the core.”

Stanaj, now a diehard Gaga aficionado, will attend Wednesday’s show with her police-officer husband, also a converted Gaga believer. She’s been startled by her own giddiness, harking back to her high-school days in the late ’80s.

“Gaga just strikes every chord with me,” she says. “It’s exciting. And she’s going to keep redesigning herself — she seems driven by that artistic expression.”

The Stanajes are part of a growing, diverse fan base, one well beyond the young females and gay men who were her audience early on. In just 10 months, says radio executive Michael McCoy, Gaga has secured the sort of broad following that often takes years to cultivate.

“She wasn’t so far out there that people couldn’t understand what she was doing,” says McCoy, program director at WKQI-FM (95.5). “There was a sense of seminormalcy in there. It was organic and accessible.”

The hype was already buzzing when Gaga played Royal Oak Music Theatre last March, a glittery, high-energy show for 1,700 curious concertgoers. Natalie Sugarman, then the venue’s marketing assistant, was impressed by the set, but amazed by what followed.

“She came into the lobby and signed everything for every single person waiting in line,” recounts Sugarman, who watched for 1 1/2 hours as Gaga attended to her fans. “She was making a personal connection with people. For an artist to take that time, at any level, is something rare.”

That’s something that should serve her well over the long haul. And a long haul does seem likely: Even in this speedy pop era, with its frantic churn rate, Lady Gaga appears equipped to keep writing her own script. Because even a frantic pop era has room for that timeless, intangible it.

“It’s that X factor that draws us to certain personalities and keeps our attention,” says Stanaj. “It just might be indescribable — if we could describe it, everybody would be fabricating it. We have that with Gaga, and we haven’t had it in a long time.”

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Lady Gaga’s new role: creative director of Polaroid

British pop star Lady Gaga has now donned the cap of creative director of Polaroid corporation to revive the popularity of the instant cameras made by them.

"I am so proud to announce my new partnership with Polaroid as the creative director and inventor of speciality projects. I am so excited to extend myself behind the scenes as a designer and as my father puts it - finally have a real job," dailystar.co.uk. quoted Gaga as saying.

Lady Gaga will officially unveil the partnership with an appearance at the consumer electronic show in Las Vegas.

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Lady Gaga is using her pipes for pitches

Nothing has been as sticky. No other advert, print or video or Web, no tweet or blog, billboard or word of mouth, has so thoroughly knitted itself into my merchandise-buying neurons. I'm fully bought-in, invested. Ebola isn't as viral. My wallet is open and its tongue is hanging out.

My vote for Advertisement of the Year 2009 is Lady Gaga's video "Bad Romance," a five-minute self-exploitation film that sells booze, high-end audio gear and stiletto heels as hard as it rocks. Canny and cagey and completely engaged in the business of business, brand Gaga is the first white artist I can think of who has embraced aspirational, label materialism with the kind of gusto shown by hip-hop artists such as Kanye West and Jay Z.

Part of me hates to throw nitromethane into the Gaga fire. The 23-year-old dance-pop sibyl is such a work of entertainment engineering, the flywheel in an enormous piece of media-eating machinery, that giving her due as an artist brings with it a certain ruefulness, the sensation of being manipulated. Not that I begrudge her the millions in album sales or the inevitable mantel full of Grammys. The Lady's got pipes, for sure, and she plays a flaming piano in a flesh-colored rhinestone bodysuit as well as anyone since, say, Liberace. I also respect the fact that even though she came up as a piano prodigy, attending New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, she has taught herself to dance like a pro. That can't be easy.

And, obviously, the club singles — "Paparazzi," "Poker Face" and "Just Dance" — are ferocious, brains-on-the-dance-floor Visigoths.

The next Madonna? We'll see. But at the moment it seems that Lady Gaga's innovations reside mostly on the business side of celebrity and that she is a disruptive technology all her own. There was a time, after all, when commercial considerations were regarded as fundamentally inartistic. Remember the fuss over Led Zeppelin's selling out its music to Cadillac, or the Beatles to Nike or U2 to, well, whomever? Only last year, critics wailed about the supposed loss of innocence in Michael Bay's GM-sponsored "Transformers." This month, Nielsen released — with appropriate tongue-clucking — its list of the top 10 shows with the highest number of product placements: No. 1 was "The Jay Leno Show."

Lady Gaga is so beyond any kind of embarrassment that she's made mercantilism its own aesthetic. In her previous video for "Love Game," a street tough swigs from a bottle of Campari as he watches Lady rut and grind (Campari, for when your evening plans call for rough sex on the subway). In the video for mega-hit "Poker Face," the card table is emblazoned with the logo for Bwin.com. She quaffs Neuro sports drink in the "Paparazzi" video; sports a Baby G watch in "Eh Eh (Nothing I Can Say)"; and wears Beat headphones by Dr. Dre (including a version of her own design) in at least a couple of videos.

All was prelude, however, to the "Bad Romance" video, which features placements for no less than 10 products: a black iPod; Philippe Starck Parrot wireless speakers; Nemiroff vodka; Gaga-designed Heartbeats earphones (via Dr. Dre); Carrera sunglasses; Nintendo Wii handsets; Hewlett-Packard Envy computers; a Burberry coat; those crazy, hobbling Alexander McQueen hyper-heels; and enough La Perla lingerie to choke an ox.

This isn't a music video so much as the QVC Channel you can dance to.

The narrative of the video — acknowledging that we kill to dissect — seems to be about the Lady Gaga character (wide-eyed and innocent, in a bathtub, Ivory soap pure and about as white) abducted by slavers, doped with vodka and put on auction in front of a bunch of tattooed, vaguely Russian-looking men, where she dances like a techno Salome. The atmosphere is superheated and oppressive, the barometric pressure looks to be about 1,000 psi. In the end, she's purchased by a man with a brass chin who beds her. But he didn't count on the incandescence of That We Call Gaga, and he spontaneously combusts. Bummer.

The temptation to deconstruct should be avoided. This is a video featuring a truly striking and beautiful woman strutting around in her skimpies to an epic club hit, surrounded by the most arresting art-house imagery the director (Francis Lawrence) and Lady Gaga's posse could dream up. The value to the product placers? How about more than 35 million views on YouTube since Nov. 10? If I worked at a Philippe Starck retail outlet I'd be stocking up on canned goods, bomb shelter-style.

In interviews, Lady Gaga (born Stefani Germanotta) wants to compare her Haus of Gaga — comprising her various business and creative interests — to Andy Warhol's art-making Factory, which is a bit of bad faith. Warhol's art reified ordinary, mass-market objects, such as the Campbell's soup can. Lady Gaga is name-checking luxury merchandise and being well paid for it. The only sound more penetrating than the beatbox is the deafening roar of cash registers.

What's so subversive about "Bad Romance" — and perhaps this is a reflection of the compromised times we live in — is that the art doesn't seem at all diminished by the business agenda. It's beautiful, it's dance-able, and it's exquisite advertising. I just wish my Alexander McQueen pumps fit better. The last stone of any church-state, art-commerce, virgin-whore wall has been toppled and — my God! — we don't miss the wall.

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GaGa Wisdom: Words from the Lady

Pop music critic Ann Powers is sharing tidbits from her recent, revealing interview with the primal force known as Lady Gaga leading up to her three sold-out performances at the Nokia Theatre at L.A. Live on Dec. 21-23. Check Pop & Hiss daily for another pearl from the girl. Today, she discusses the emotional evolution that led up to the writing of the eight new songs featured on the reissue of her bestselling album "The Fame" — the repackaged version is known as "The Fame Monster" — and how it influenced her elaborate touring production, the Monster Ball.

Lady Gaga on her emotional evolution: "I'm in a deeper, more compassionate place than where I was when I wrote 'The Fame.' The truth about 'The Fame' is that so much of myself as a woman is hinged on the idea that I can self-empower. I do that with my views and my passions and with the way I choose to carry myself, with the way that I treat other people, with the way that I operate from a place of, I don't care if you love me, I care if you love yourself.

"But it's meant to be this ironic juxtaposition in the Monster Ball. I talk endlessly about my fans and then I writhe around on the floor and say, 'Do you wanna [have sex with] me?' It's asking the question, 'What is it that we really love about stars?' If the beckoning question is always, 'Why don't you love me?,' there's something off about that."

Pop music critic Ann Powers is sharing tidbits from her recent, revealing interview with the primal force known as Lady Gaga leading up to her three sold-out performances at the Nokia Theatre at L.A. Live on Dec. 21-23. Check Pop & Hiss daily for another pearl from the girl.

Today, Gaga sheds light on the true meaning of her excellent new song "Dance in the Dark." Sit back — it's a long explanation.

"The record is about a girl who likes to have sex with the lights off, because she's embarrassed about her body. She doesn't want her man to see her naked. She will be free, and she will let her inner animal out, but only when the lights are out. She doesn't feel free without the moon. These lyrics are a way for me to talk about how I believe women and some men feel innately insecure about themselves all the time. It's not sometimes, it's not in adolescence, it's always.

"Also, I'm working with Viva Glam on MAC AIDS Fund stuff and the more I learn about AIDS and HIV…. most of the new infections are in women my age, and in women ages 53 to 64, older women who haven't had sex in a long time, and in a moment of passion are irresponsible and contract HIV, and women my age who think their boyfriend won't love them if they speak up. Condoms aren't female. They're making female condoms, but right now it's, "buy a Trojan" – it's for men. So everything's in a man's power, and women are taught to be receivers… It's just a very deluded way of looking at sex.

"I guess all of these new things entering my life are changing the way I view my purpose, but that song in particular is about me wanting to live — but also, the song isn't called 'Dance in the Light.' I'm not a gospel singer trying to cross people over. What I'm saying is, 'I get it. I feel you, I feel the same way, and it's OK.'

"I hope and pray that I can inspire some sort of change in people subliminally through the show. They're singing 'Dance in the Dark,' but they're dancing and they're free, they're letting it out. But the songs are not about freedom, they're about [the fact that] I get it. I feel the way you feel."

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GaGa about women

Lady GaGa has had sex with women but has only ever been in love with men, she revealed in a new interview.

The pop icon appeared on US TV as a guest of Barbara Walters this week, where she asked about her private life.

She confirmed that international chart smash "Poker Face" was inspired by her fascination with same sex relationships.

"That's really what the song was all about - why when I was with my boyfriend was I fantasising about women?!", she told the chat show host.

When asked by Walters about her lesbian flings, she explained: "I've certainly had sexual relationships with women, yeah".

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The Fame Monster

Lady Gaga 'The Fame Monster' for sale. Find a wide variety of listings on Lady Gaga's 'The Fame Monster' album. New and used CDs for sale at cheap discounted prices. Our listings are updated daily, check back often for 'The Fame'!

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ELLE Makes A Lady of Gaga

Vainstyle was anticipating the calm after the Gaga fashion storm and after a few recent hints, its finally here. A toned-down, but certainly fashion friendly Lady Gaga graces the cover of the newest ELLE Magazine. Gaga is seen in a simple black lace ensemble and allows her entire face to be exposed with very minimalist make-up. It’s even rumored that she has even had some cosmetic work done to her face.

On bodily reactions to stress: “I get all the symptoms of a pregnant woman. I get headaches, I get tired, I get blurred vision sometimes during a really intense session with [her creative team] the Haus.”

On a recurring theme in her work: “I feel that if I can show my demise artistically to the public, I can somehow cure my own legend. I can show you so you’re not looking for it. I’m dying for you on domestic television—here’s what it looks like, so no one has to wonder.”

On being a former waitress: “I was really good at it. I always got big tips. I always wore heels to work! I told everybody stories, and for customers on dates, I kept it romantic. It’s kind of like performing.”

On using her sexuality: “My album covers are not sexual at all, which was an issue at my record label. I fought for months, and I cried at meetings. They didn’t think the photos were commercial enough…The last thing a young woman needs is another picture of a sexy pop star writhing in sand, covered in grease, touching herself.”

On her romantic future: “In eight to 10 years, I want to have babies for my Dad to hold, grandkids. And I want to have a husband who loves and supports me, just the way anyone else does. I would never leave my career for a man right now, and I would never follow a man around.”

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Lady Gaga “LoveGame” Music Video

Lady Gaga - LoveGame Official Music Video!

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